This is the same video on the BBC web site. The advantage of watching it here is that it can play in Real Player which means you have the option of watching it at full screen size instead of in a little box.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeldmet him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.

I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his."

That is one of the most entertaining and fulfilling monologues I've had the pleasure of reading. Everyone make a note of this thread and refer Joo to it whenever he starts blathering on about sanctions and Europe and whatever else he's learned in the Right-Wing Circle-Jerking Society.

Can you imagine how much fun he had writing this? (or whoever wrote it) Being in a position where you knew you could fry the administration and having the time to select every word in advance to make them look more ridiculous.

Of course this was only one event so it isn't on the same scale, but it is said this is what actually mad Kennedy (JFK) so popular. Every word chosen in advance, every word rehearsed, nothing left to chance.

Which is an altogether different impression than the general public have of JFK..(sorry sort of off-topic I guess.) I was just impressed with the way Galloway was able to tie it to the McCarthy Hearings from the moment he was accused in the British press through the hearings until now.

That being said it brings to mind another quote (bastardized for the situation)and aimed at Galaoway:

Thanks, I've been wanting to see this. Man, they were stupid. What were they expecting? He's an anti-war British politician, for heaven's sake! They should have known he was going to roast them.

They live in a bubble of hubris and usually have nothing more threatening to cope with than the US SSMedia (Smoke Screen Media). The thing that I regret most about that video is that it didn't show Coleman and Levin. What fun it would have been to see some shots of their faces.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his."

In the recent parliamentary elections, the British people, given the choice between standing for the rule of law or embracing partisan politics, chose the latter, voting with their pocketbooks, even though it meant re-electing a man who led Britain into an illegal war of aggression, based on lies and misrepresentation of fact.
Tony Blair is a man who has shown himself more subservient to an American president with empire in his eyes than to a British tradition of respect for the rule of law that dates back to the Magna Carta. There is at least one politician, however, that the citizens of Britain can today be proud of, regardless of how one views his politics. This is a man who, back in 2002, had the courage to stand up to Blair and George Bush, calling Blair a liar and declaring that both were behaving like "wolves" towards Iraq. For speaking the truth, he was castigated, thrown out of the Labour party and smeared with false allegations of corruption - at the same time as the US government hid its role in enriching Saddam Hussein's government with illegal kickbacks. He has now charged back, winning a parliamentary seat previously controlled by the very party that evicted him.

And now the same man has done something that no other British politician has been brave enough to do: cross the Atlantic and confront the United States over the lies spread about the reasons for war with Iraq, the oil for food agreement and the failure of US lawmakers to do their own job when it comes to the rule of law.

George Galloway, the politician in question, stared down the US Senate subcommittee on homeland security and government affairs, and its notoriously partisan chairman Norm Coleman, and blasted as totally unfounded the committee's allegations that he had profited from oil vouchers in exchange for his anti-war stance. He emerged from the hearing victorious. If only more politicians, British and American alike, were able to display such courage in the face of the atmosphere of neoconservative intimidation prevalent in Washington these days.

Galloway is now the darling of the American left, and has fed punch lines for late-night comics and generated headlines like the New York Post's "Brit fries senators in oil". But mainstream America still seems unable to digest the horrific reality that the MP's testimony underscored: that Senator Coleman's McCarthy-like hearings are but a smoke screen for a crime of horrific proportions.

Galloway has nevertheless had the courage to stand up to unjust charges and an unjust war - and that is the only way that opinion will shift. Two years ago I wrote that the accusations of corruption against Galloway were too convenient, designed to silence one of the Iraq war's harshest critics. The honourable member for Bethnal Green and Bow has entered the lair of a conservative American political body to confront it head-on about a war and occupation that many on both sides of the Atlantic, politicians and public alike, seem only too willing to sweep under the carpet. So, Mr Galloway, please accept from this American three cheers for a job well done.

· Scott Ritter was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998; his new book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy, will be published this summer